World launches in the US with iris scans, WLD rewards, and new partnerships

World has officially launched in the United States across six major cities, bringing its controversial eye-scanning ID system and crypto rewards to American users. Per an April 30 announcement , the Sam Altman -backed project kicked off its US expansion with new flagship locations in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco. These cities, which the World dubbed as “key innovation hubs,” will now host dedicated spaces where people can line up, get their irises scanned, and receive free WLD tokens in return. The launch event, titled “At Last,” was held at Fort Mason in San Francisco and included a keynote address by co-founders Sam Altman and Alex Blania. The event also featured a live demonstration of the Orb device, which scans users’ irises and faces to generate a unique IrisCode, a biometric marker that confirms the individual hasn’t previously enrolled. New partnerships World also announced two major partnerships. First, Visa is set to launch a “World Visa card” later this year, available exclusively to users who have completed Orb verification. The card will support payments using WLD tokens and other cryptocurrencies. Second, Match Group, the company behind Tinder, Match.com, Plenty of Fish, and Hinge, will begin testing World ID in Japan. The pilot will use the ID system to verify users’ ages and authenticity on Tinder, with the goal of reducing fake profiles and improving safety. Further, the company reiterated its plans to expand integrations for World ID across several other online platforms, including Minecraft, Reddit, Telegram, Shopify, and Discord. These integrations would allow users to sign in using their World ID, providing a form of proof-of-personhood that aims to stand out in an increasingly AI-saturated internet. World addresses privacy concerns World’s US launch comes after years of skirting the market over regulatory worries tied to its token and biometric data practices. With the current crypto-friendly climate under the Trump administration, those roadblocks now appear to be clearing . Since its inception, the project has faced regulatory pushback in several other countries, including Spain, Portugal, Hong Kong, and the Dominican Republic , where authorities ordered it to halt operations due to privacy concerns. Critics have raised alarms about the risks of scanning and storing sensitive data like iris patterns, especially in regions with strict data protection laws. To address these concerns, Adrian Ludwig, the chief information security officer at Tools for Humanity, outlined that the project does not store all data in a single location. Instead, it splits user information across multiple institutions, including financial and blockchain partners, using cryptographic methods to ensure that no one party holds a complete data set. “No one party holds a complete data set,” Ludwig noted, pointing to high-profile breaches like the Panama Papers leak as examples of what World is trying to prevent. Anyone attempting to reconstruct a user’s identity would have to “compromise all of them simultaneously,” a scenario he described as highly unlikely. WLD briefly surged from $1.04 to $1.16 on the heels of the US launch and partnership buzz, but the rally fizzled just as fast. The token has since slipped back to around $1.08, reflecting cautious optimism amid lingering market scepticism. The post World launches in the US with iris scans, WLD rewards, and new partnerships appeared first on Invezz

Source: Invezz